’Gertie’s Babies,’ Sold at Birth, Use DNA to Recover Lost Past

Decades ago, a midwife in Montana was selling babies

COEUR D’ALENE, Idaho — Sue Docken’s start in life, in 1951, with a no-questions-asked cash adoption at the hands of a midwife, had strong elements of the crime scene that it was.

Her adoptive father was told to stay in the car and keep the motor running. His wife went into a nondescript office building in Butte, Montana, where she met with the midwife, Gertrude Pitkanen, and was handed the hours-old infant and the afterbirth, offered a peek through a curtain at the young mother lying in a bed, and told to leave. Docken’s adoptive parents paid $500 for her that day.

Docken is one of two dozen people, mostly in the West, belonging to a club whose members call themselves “Gertie’s Babies.” (More are believed to be out there, unknown perhaps even to themselves.) Their lives are diverse, connected only by a common thread: Pitkanen. She delivered and sold babies, performed abortions — and mostly evaded legal consequence — in Butte from the 1920s through the 1950s. The secrets she left have fueled a search for origins and answers, in some cases lasting decades.

Now, some of the stories of the Gertie’s Babies have started to come to light through DNA-matching research sites, to which people can send a cheek swab in hopes of finding a match with relatives who have also submitted a sample. Tales have emerged of desperation, betrayal and secrets taken to the grave, but also of joy and newfound connection, such as Heather Livergood’s.

Livergood, 69, of Coeur D’Alene, grew up loved, she said. The parents who bought her from Pitkanen in February 1946 could not have been better. But she was also haunted until last year by the fragments of the story she had: her father’s memories, the day he bought her in a motel room for $100 and the mostly false birth certificate signed by Pitkanen that said her mother’s name was Violet Wilson.

Through an Ancestry.com match last year, Livergood found a cousin, who began combing family records and memories and found a Violet who had lived in the small town of Grantsville, Utah.

The rest of the story slowly spilled out over months: how Wilson’s real last name was Sandberg and how in mid-1945, with World War II winding down but her husband still away, she became pregnant with another man’s child.

“Poor Violet,” Livergood said. She said learning the story had given her new insight into the lonely years of the war and the dark secrets her mother never told her two sons, half-brothers to Livergood, who met them for the first time last year.

“The details of how these things happened, I don’t think will ever be found,” said Rob Derrick, a computer scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.

Derrick, 59, is not a Gertie’s Baby, but he found out recently to his huge shock that he has a half-brother and a half-sister who are.

The siblings were given up by their mother, Antoinette Josephine Derrick. Rob Derrick and the man he calls “my new brother,” Gary Drake, along with their wives, plan to meet for the first time this weekend in Butte.